From the ground, the circling military planes looked like a tornado speckled with glittering black and silver triangles. They held their pattern for a good twenty minutes, then there was a sudden, dull WHUMP at ground zero. The refinery and everything inside and around it simply . . . disintegrated in a ball of molten light. The F-48s shot upward, engines screaming as the pilots pushed to stay above the blast zone. Only the lead one lagged slightly so he could release the FAE immediately after the detonation of the mini-nuclear device. As he turned the nose of his jet upward and pulled back on the throttle, the thirty-five-year-old pilot was more concerned about the success of his explosive device than escaping the blossoming cloud. His family was down there, his wife and three kids probably eating lunch right about now in their house in Des Plaines. His two boys and toddler daughter loved peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and if something went wrong, all three and his wife would end up drenched in radiation poisoning, nothing but walking dead.
But no—
The FAE dropped into place and detonated precisely when it was supposed to, right to the millisecond. There was another sound, deeper and more condensed, and suddenly the burgeoning mushroom-shaped cloud collapsed into itself, layer after layer folding in as though an immense, unseen vacuum cleaner was sucking every bit of the poisonous matter out of the air. It took a total of twenty-eight seconds for both the nuclear bomb to obliterate the refinery and the specialized FAE to eliminate the remains of the nuclear bomb.
And then nothing was left except a gigantic, blackened scar on the Illinois soil that the government would surround with twelve-foot electrified fencing and let lie fallow for the next seven decades.
TWO
Sometimes, right before some especially important event in her life, Violet would stand at the window and stare at the seemingly endless ocean of buildings outside. It was an impressive thing to view, particularly because of the way mankind’s architecture and design had evolved to blend itself with nature. So much effort had gone into ensuring that what man created would harmonize perfectly with the sky and the earth and everything else built around it.
Harmony.
Such a small word.
Had there ever been a word more overused by hypocrites?
The world into which Violet had been born was one that some people found difficult to understand, her included . . . yet in other ways it was all too sadly familiar. It was interesting that only the scholars seemed able to appreciate the mistakes that mankind continued to make again and again, despite their best intentions and their perpetual and sincere belief that they were wiser than the previous generations. Those in power, the elected officials and the people’s representatives, were apparently doomed to repeat the errors of the past, each action masked by their oblivious claims to a wisdom they didn’t have now and had never possessed.
The root of their difficulties, Violet supposed, lay in the fact that the twenty-first century had been, for all intents and purposes, the last era of any kind of mystery. Mankind had experienced such a sudden upsurge in knowledge and discovery that by the end of the twenty-first century, nearly all riddles had been unraveled, all problems had been solved—even the common cold had been cured. String theory had been unified, the secrets of space revealed, nearly everything that could be known, was. Or at least that’s what everyone liked to believe. So if someone had a question, someone else, somewhere, now knew the answer—
Santa Claus? Nope. Loch Ness Monster? Definitely not. Chupacabra? Actually, yes. Will parsley really kill parakeets? Sometimes. Oh, and the one question people had always had:
“Mommy, is there really such a thing as vampires?”
Like the discovery of some previously unknown stinkbug on the Asian subcontinent, the answer turned out to be “Yes.” And strangely, many didn’t even know what they really were.
The records archives, the older ones, still held the story—apparently no one saw any reason to soften the ugly facts of how everything had started so long ago, how mankind’s terror and prejudice had changed and unified and multiplied. Violet knew the facts and figures by heart, had gone over them a thousand times in her studies. For some, that’s all it was—statistics, history, a part of the past to be learned about but not actually learned from. The past. But the things that happened before had a nasty way of coming back to haunt what was going on in the here and now.
It was kind of fitting that it would all come down to business here in Chicago. After all, for her the end of everything had started here, with a young woman who’d been a nurse at Loyola Medical Center for three years before she’d gotten pregnant. She and her husband had been trying for a child for quite some time—long before she’d gotten her nursing certificate—and they were overjoyed. Everything went wonderfully the first four months: she didn’t have even a hint of morning sickness, she gained weight at a reasonable rate, she even glowed in that elusive, special way that people sometimes say expectant mothers do.
In her fifth month, however, the woman had started feeling a little on the down side. While her husband teased her by calling her “Plumpy,” her skin went a little paler than it should have been and she felt more tired than normal given the stage of her pregnancy. Worst of all, after having been an outdoors person all her life, she developed a really annoying allergy to sunlight. All a bit odd, but probably nothing to worry about; even so, she and her doctor decided to do a few routine blood tests, just to be on the safe side.
Every avalanche has to start somewhere, and with this one it had been in a blood analysis lab at Loyola . . . and Northwestern University Hospital . . . and Cook County . . . and a thousand others across the country, nearly simultaneously. An untold number of lab technicians bent over blood spectrograph results and stared at numbers that simply couldn’t be true.
But they were.
At ten after six on a Tuesday morning, she was dressed and almost ready to leave for her morning shift when the doorbell rang. Even now she remembered how for no discernible reason her stomach had performed a nasty roll, the kind a person gets when she nearly drops some particularly treasured piece of antique family crystal. For the next few seconds she was left feeling sick and slightly disoriented, then she gathered herself and headed to the front hallway; by the time she got there, she’d already put that feeling—premonition?—out of her mind. When she opened the door and shaded her oversensitive eyes against the morning sunlight, the nurse fully expected to find the paper girl (her husband had forgotten to leave out the monthly check the day before), so she was more than startled to find a pair of federal agents flashing badges at her while a white-coated, thin-faced doctor hovered nervously behind them. Instead of clocking in at seven A.M., she found herself hustled to a stand-alone outbuilding on the Loyola grounds. There she stood, until her back ached and her feet hurt, in a line that was long enough to curve around and out of sight. Like her, no one else in the strangely silent line had a clue as to why they were here beyond some anonymous doctor’s terse statement that they were “sick” and the government required them to register because of it. They were told that the armed military men and women patrolling the area were for their safety. That, of course, was a bald-faced lie, just one more added to more incidents of deception than she would ever be able to count.
Really, to use the term “vampire” was nothing short of sensationalism. The condition was nothing more spectacular than a blood anomaly that had probably been around for centuries but never been detected before the latest and greatest improvement in medical equipment. The phrase “blood condition” just didn’t pack enough punch for the news, though. VAMPIRES ROAM OUR STREETS! sold a lot more papers and sponsor slots on the expensive satellite television stations. The masses just loved “true” journalism.
In the end, it didn’t matter what they were called, although prisoners would have definitely been a far more accurate title. They were all discovered, all documented. All studied.
She didn’t know why it was necessary, but she suspected that the
rest of the people who’d stood in line with her on registration day had ended up with their heads shaved, too. The medical and military people hadn’t given her a choice, just leaned her back on an examining chair, strapped her in before she realized what was going on, and done it. By then, when she was told to shut up, she obeyed. She wasn’t allowed to look in a mirror afterward, but the sight of her hair—at the time it was long and dark—dropping to the white floor in clumps had outright terrified her. This was America—no one just got yanked out of their homes, shaved, and held against their will.
Did they?
She cooperated as best she could. Again, she didn’t have much of a choice—any at all, as a matter of fact—but she’d always been an optimistic person and she couldn’t let go of the hope that if she did everything they asked, submitted to each and every one of the dizzying and inexplicable array of medical tests without protesting, they—that omnipotent, royal They—would let her, and of course her unborn child, go free.
From her, the feds definitely got their money’s worth in terms of interesting information. As it turned out, in some ways the old legends that had grown up around the disease over the years were true . . . well, in a warped, slightly ghoulish sort of way. Most, of course, were not, and more than a few of the government’s scientists looked the fool as a result of their silly assumptions. One of those prime times had been when she’d looked puzzled and clearly sardonic as a team of analysts marched into the examination room and showed her, of all things, a gold crucifix.
The disease was ultimately called Hemophagia, and its primary symptom was detrimental to no one but the carrier—that unfortunate man or woman who soon discovered that he or she possessed an aggressively accelerated metabolism. The medical team was intrigued to find her average body temperature was one hundred seven, even though she insisted she felt fine and her pregnancy was advancing normally. Electrocardiogram tapes consistently recorded a strong and steady resting heart rate of an unheard-of hundred fifty beats a minute.
It all seemed good, but as the old saying went, nothing really good comes without a price. All this cellular activity took an unwanted toll on the carrier’s body. With their metabolisms speeding along at unprecedented rates, the victims of Hemophagia could expect to survive, if they were lucky, no more than ten years after their first exposure to the disease.
Appearance-wise, well, there wasn’t much to see. Yes, they had slightly elongated canines, but certainly not the wolflike teeth of legend, and even these were easily attributed to the massively increased density of bone and dentin throughout the body. On a physical level, they were simply stronger, and if you checked the skeletal X-rays of any carrier, you could see right on the films that Hemophagia accelerated healing. Some of the deeper wounds inflicted on the young woman at the height of her “testing” healed in only a matter of hours.
As the disease progressed, its symptoms became more pronounced. No, its victims didn’t suck blood . . . but it did cripple the body’s ability to regenerate blood platelets. As a result, Hemophages were pale and anemic, and they required frequent blood transfusions to stay alive. The longer they were afflicted with the disease, the more sensitive they became to daylight. The pregnant young woman was a prime example of that—full term in her pregnancy, every time she walked in the hospital gardens she had to use a cane and carry a heavy black umbrella to protect herself against the glare of the noonday sun.
All that stuff about silver bullets and stakes? Total, ridiculous fantasy. Yes, the Hemophages were a little faster and a little stronger than an uninfected human, but they died just like everyone else.
And just to be sure, the feds tried out that theory on their “guests” in a number of unsavory ways.
Her belly was flat now, bisected by a cesarean scar where they’d taken her unborn child out of her belly and disappeared with it—she didn’t even know if it had been a boy or a girl. Were they experimenting on the baby just like they continued to experiment on her? Her mind screamed with need and rage, but physically she was too drained of will to protest, too weak and sedated to fight. Her child was gone and she was outnumbered—she could never escape. There was nothing to do but submit to the straps and the chair and the endless parade of medical personnel and military guards—
—even when they killed her.
She was surrounded by monitors and screens, but she still didn’t know enough to see the inevitable coming, she was still too innocent. The electric shock was . . . unexpected. Indescribably painful. And, of course, utterly lethal. What the smug scientists discovered, adding another interest point to their charts and their records and their graphs, was that Hemophages were like anyone else: if you killed them, they stayed dead. Unless, like this young woman, you needed them for just a little while longer. In that case, a nice pair of paddles, a bit of lubricant, and a portable defibrillator would work just fine, and so they could continue their experiments.
But the world didn’t end at the locked doors of the laboratories. Outside it was chaos, first one—the discovery of the disease—then another transnational conflict. The second one was the more devastating—wars fueled by religion usually are. It wasn’t long before the protests and the marches mutated into full civil war, and the catalyst for that was the government, doing what governments have done since the beginning of time: trying to make a bigger, better, faster, stronger weapon.
By the time the federal doctors started withdrawing enough daily vials of her blood to see if they could alter it to make a better and faster soldier, the woman was numb, someone who’d lost everything of value and was now barely anything above a still-breathing zombie. In another part of the medical complex, in a laboratory marked CLASSIFIED ACCESS ONLY—IDENTIFICATION REQUIRED, a group of high-ranking men in military uniforms—lots of shoulder stars and bars—were given a detailed tour by a distinguished-looking doctor. Even though the doctor had salt and pepper hair and carried himself well, it wasn’t lost on his guests just how eager he was to please them—after all, federal money was always a boon to any contractor project.
There are some things in the universe that always turn out the same way . . . the wrong way. Some folks call it “Murphy’s Law”—whatever can go wrong, will. Others just label it plain old stupidity, the hunt for power, the never-ending greed inherent in the DNA of those mere mortals who can never seem to control or stop their own repetitious mistakes.
They didn’t make a better soldier, or a faster one, or a braver one. As he watched the generals and the lab supervisor move across to the other end of the facility, one of the lab technicians frowned, then pressed his forehead back up to the eyepiece of his microscope. What he was seeing was anything but good—the original strain of virus had been devastating to its victims, yes, but only over time. The virus was just an anomaly, an oddity of nature that could doubtlessly be contracted by some as-yet unknown method, but it wasn’t even contagious—a carrier couldn’t give it to a noninfected person, even with blood-to-blood exposure. And like smallpox, there was a segment of the population—in this instance, most of it—that was simply immune.
But this strain, the new one born of DNA modification and laboratory processing and which they’d dubbed “H.P.V.”—HemoPhagic Virus . . .
This was more virulent, extremely fast-moving, highly contagious, and just like its predecessor, incurable.
The technician sighed and looked up again, then rolled his stool away from the lab table. He couldn’t wait any longer—this had to be brought to the attention of not only his supervisor, but those higher up the chain of command. His supervisor was a nobody, a brown-nosing guy who looked more distinguished and intelligent than he actually was. The higher-ups had to know the dangers inherent with this kind of DNA modification, and if the lab tech himself had to take a little bit of heat for being the one to precipitate the closure of the project, then so be it. Med and lab techs were a high-demand field nowadays, and he could always find another job.
He reached forward with his left ha
nd and spun the coarse adjustment knob on his Meiji microscope until the stage lowered, then tugged the glass slide out of the stage clips and lifted it from the stage. He started to turn toward a sterilized petri dish, then realized that for some reason, his thumb was stinging. When he glanced down at his hand, everything he saw registered in his eyes but didn’t want to feed into his brain. Time changed, went into a sort of slow-motion crawl as his knees went weak and his breath stuttered with terror. It was a damned good thing he wasn’t standing far away from his stool.
His first mistake had been not removing the slide more carefully from the stage—he’d cut the pad of his thumb, ever so slightly, on the bottom corner of it. It was nothing, really, no more than a prick, like the tiny wounds that were the result of the glass shards they’d used in blood testing back in the twentieth century. A minute drop of his own blood was smeared across the skin’s surface, barely noticeable. Like sticking your finger with a needle when you try to sew on a button, and hadn’t his mom always said that a button wouldn’t stay on if you didn’t add a little blood?
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